


Thy Father's Glass

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Big Brothers, Child Neglect, Crossover, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Family Secrets, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Holmes Brothers, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Introspection, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, M/M, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-01
Updated: 2015-05-01
Packaged: 2018-03-26 13:26:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3852541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Holmes Boys have their father's eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thy Father's Glass

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing.   
> This is a crossover with Murder Rooms(2000-01). The boy's natural father is a modern version of the fictionalized version of Joseph Bell, played by Ian Richardson.   
> This is a crossover/plot idea which I will probably expand on in other fics, both in this fic's universe and outside it.

Sherlock Holmes does, in fact, come from money, rather a lot of it, but his family is not and never has been titled. Still, the money is old enough and significant enough to rank a rather drafty and large manor in a posher part of the English countryside, complete with servant’s quarters down to undergardener detail and a portrait gallery with ceilings high enough to fly a modest kite, if any of the dark stained windows ever deigned to crack a single inch. 

Layers of dust attesting to the general lack of servants in a more modern age never accounted for by builders who thought to include accommodation for a staff of 30 plus in a low period have hung from every frame since as long as either of the brothers can remember. 

All save one. Erasmus Holmes, resplendent in a red waistcoat that matches his flame coloured hair, glows out of a carefully dusted canvas. His brown eyes seem to judge everything and nothing. 

Sherlock loved that painting when he was small, not leastwise due to his mother’s lavish amounts of time and care spent dusting the eternal reminder of a father she had adored, gone long before either of her woebegone sons could bring shame into his dark brown eyes, eyes she and her brother and sister all inherited. 

Sherlock is fidgeting in class at the fourth boarding school his parents have attempted to send him to that year alone, his eight year old brain drugged up just enough to focus for a few moments at intermittent intervals, allowing basic ideas of genetics to sink in, boring, he knows this, he can read you know. 

Yet somehow, that’s when he realizes, staring at a boring teacher pointing to a boring blackboard discussing something boring and childish he’s known since he was two. 

“You see but you do not observe.” Mycroft never ceased to remind Sherlock of that, last hols, and as usual his brother is right because Sherlock has known for years that in genetics brown eyes are dominant, has known that both his parents have brown eyes, has known that he has to sneak into the portrait gallery because his mother can’t stand the sight of him in proximity to the precious image of her beloved father, has known that Mycroft can’t stand to be anywhere near that room at all.

Knows that his brother’s eyes are as grey as his own. 

Sherlock has always known those things, but he’s eight years old and bored before he deduces the significance. 

 

\--

His mother parades Mycroft and Sherlock in matching pressed suits at her annual showing off to the local elite’s wives feat the summer of Sherlock’s fifth year, like she does every year. 

Mycroft, now a teenager, is really too old for it, but he’s always been the dutiful son. 

He’s carefully attempting to quietly prevent Sherlock from getting even more dirt on his matching tie when the golf president’s wife’s shrill cry pierces the garden. 

“What lovely sons you have, Vi darling. Such unusual eyes, so grey!” 

Mycroft is later prepared to swear you could have heard a pin drop, for all they were standing on a slightly soggy spring lawn without a solid surface in sight. 

Mummy never brings them out at a public function again. 

 

\--

 

Sherlock breaks his family when he is fifteen, Mycroft away at university and mother well into the evening’s sherry. Father disappeared into his study hours before, more present in his absence than he ever is by his actual physical proximity. 

Sherlock’s never asked the question before, never even thought about it, but somehow, in that moment, finished with boarding school for good years early and facing a seemingly endless sentence of boredom trapped in this old ruin with them, because Mycroft is gone and Sherlock is stuck, he can’t seem to stop himself. He never can it seems. 

“Who’s our father Mummy?”

It’s an incredibly childish sounding question, innocent and piercing and visceral and undeniable. 

There’s a crash from father’s study, timed in perfect harmony with the shattering of Mummy’s favourite cut crystal glass set on the hard wood of the table. 

The whiskey tumbler turns out to leave more of a bruise than Sherlock predicted. 

..

Sherlock runs away from the manor for good the next day, leaving behind the remnants of a rather cold childhood, a perfect match to the smashed bottles of perfume on his mother’s dressing table, sickly sweet clouds of fakish rose and apple scents clashing and cloying for dominance, the only evidence of a son’s desperate search for something he’ll stalk all his life. 

The truth. 

..

Sherlock’s on his seventh stint of rehab before his mother deigns to so much as visit him in hospital. He’d be less surprised if it wasn’t more than Mycroft’s seen her since leaving for Uni at 16, their “father” long since in the wind at this mid juncture of Sherlock’s twenties. 

She doesn’t stay long. Sherlock tells himself it’s because he pretended to be asleep. He’s good at pretending. Mummy was a good teacher. 

She leaves a single sheet of folded paper, rather than a fruit basket. 

Sherlock considers burning it, but in the end, it somehow winds up carefully jammed between the jaws of a certain skull, a present from Lestrade on his first successful completion of rehab. Seven times the charm apparently. 

He doesn’t unfold it for eight more years. 

..

Siger Holmes dies on a mountain expedition when Sherlock is thirty one, the remarkable lack of foul play startling any next of kin more than his eventual demise. 

It’s not that Sherlock or Mycroft miss him, having not actually seen him since Sherlock finished puberty. Sherlock can’t recall ever actually seeing him before that either, or more accurately being seen by him, really. 

Still, they go to the funeral. There is a funeral. 

Sherlock watches from a slight remove while the coffin is lowered, his gaze fixed firmly on Mycroft’s white knuckled grip on Lestrade’s hand, resolutely refusing to scatter earth, before leaving early with a sweep of his great coat. 

Violet declined to attend. 

Sherlock ransacks the flat upon his return, John following him at a fashionably later early retreat to find the living room in tatters, an unhinged skull at the center of the chaos. 

Sherlock has always known that Mycroft was almost a decade older than him. It’s never ceased to annoy him. 

It’s also never really mattered before. Somehow it does now though. Somehow. 

..

Sherlock sneaks into the back of the lecture hall as students slowly filter in. It’s been a decade since he abandoned his Cambridge days, and predictably little has changed. Blending in is ridiculously easy. 

Except Sherlock never paid this much attention in his student days. The lecture is fascinating, no denying, but Sherlock’s far more interested in the piercing eyes that gaze out in challenge to the sea of impressionable and so very not-bored students in obvious challenge, their grey tone reflected and amplified by the natural light filtering in from the ancient vaulted windows far above their heads. 

 

..

Sherlock has never particularly wanted or needed a father. He’s had Mycroft instead, from the moment he was born, no matter what changes or what he does or who he is, that has never changed. 

He’s never been able to shake Mycroft, no matter how hard he’s tried. And he has tried. 

A father somehow pales in comparison to that, whether gazing disapprovingly from the depths of a painting or drifting absently passed in a hall once in a blue moon, eyes unseeing. 

Sherlock’s never needed or wanted a father. 

But Mycroft does. 

That’s good enough for Sherlock. 

..

Sherlock slowly makes his way up the decidedly ordinary walk, pausing beside the rows of overly cheerful pansies long enough to flip up his coat collar-Show off. Shut up John-, hand hesitating on the lion’s head knocker under long pale fingers. 

The pause after the knocker falls for the second time feels like it stretches across a lifetime. 

The figure that answers the door is undeniably real and distinctly not at all like a painting, but Sherlock tilts his head up slightly and can’t help but be captured by the eyes, just as he was as a child. Only this time, the eyes regarding him with an equal intensity are real. Warm and steady and haunting and familiar and undeniably seeing. 

Grey eyes.


End file.
